ClassDojo Groups – The Best Just Gets Better

(What’s that you say? You don’t know what ClassDojo is? I’ve blogged about it here)

If you ever have a question, they’re on it straight away and get back to you as soon as they can. If you request a feature, they take your request very seriously and make many people’s requests a reality. However, there had been one feature that was requested much, much more than others: the ability to award points to groups of children with just one click/tap. In true ClassDojo style, that request has now become a reality!

Yesterday was a big day for ClassDojo as the Groups feature was finally unveiled to the world. I had a sneak preview a couple of weeks ago, yet for some reason didn’t think to schedule a blog post to be published yesterday morning! No ‘forward-thinking’ Dojo points for me!

So, early yesterday morning, before setting off to the Google Moonshot Summit, I updated my ClassDojo iPhone app (Android also available here) and had a play around. I started by splitting the children in my class into their house groups:

After that, I had a think of how else I could use Groups.

One immediately obvious way of using this feature is to award points to children, depending on which table they sit at (I don’t group children by ability, so they have a fixed table for each half-term):

I could use them to keep a track of guided reading groups, rewarding whole groups for engagement and teamwork in the same time it takes to reward one individual child:

I love splitting children into groups to work on projects. In my class we call these ‘Learning Teams’ (maybe I should blog about this at some point…). In the past I have asked children to take any picture book that they love and change the setting and characters to fit the cross-curricular project we’re working on, for example, ‘The Polar Regions.’ Children could earn points while working in these teams:

In assemblies, the children in my class usually end up sitting in the same position, in the same rows. I always look out to see which row is sitting well, ready to listen and take part. Before now, awarding points in assembly was cumbersome, as I would have had to select each child individually, but now I can have their rows set up and ready to go:

So now that the most-requested feature has become a reality, I wonder what the new most-requested feature is? Watch this space – something just as big is coming in August…